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Comment by josiahsiegel | Hacker News Reader

Productivity has also appeared to increase with remote work (at least at my job), yet I keep seeing articles from high-profile CEOs on how remote work is bad for business. I'm not quite sure where all the resistance to remote work is coming from.

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I think you'll find that it makes sense if you begin imagining non-productivity reasons why execs want workers back. Sunk cost fallacy over an expensive office is a regular guess, personally I suspect that it's got to be quite a rush to see hundreds of people working at your direction in an office and remote work cannot replace that.

That or bad management techniques work better in person.

It's astonishing how unified the message is, across big tech and smaller tech leaderships. It's like every CEO is reading a script from the same business magazine: "We understand how important it is for employees to return to the office and we can't wait to make this happen! We know that this is the One True Way to work, and that everyone is looking forward to it! We must get Back To Normal and the only way to do it is to get bodies in offices." How many of us have heard variations of this script in our own internal memos?

I've never seen all of Corporate America's CxO-level Leadership so aligned with each other on a topic like they are aligned on Return To Office being the only logical way...

Maybe the are used to collect all the suffering by sitting over the main office with all its cubicles.

Maybe they are afraid of a way more aggressive competition for workers and what they have to pay them. Considering they now could switch the workplace via different login credentials.

What alternative hypotheses have you considered and dismissed to explain why so many CEOs agree on this approach?

There exists an area of study emerging in economics covering the effect of companies being directed by a small number of shareholders - for example, if the key stakeholders of all US airlines are (for the sake of the argument) Black Rock, then what effect does that have on the companies? If they same shareholder selects the same sort of execs for all their airlines in their portfolio, how does that affect the strategies for each company? If Delta loses share but United gains it and you've got a similar shareholding in both, what difference does it make.

If significant investors have heavy positions in commercial and residential real estate in particular locations, and also has a significant position in companies who employ workers in those locations, how might that change the perception of how your employer does business? Will support a CEO taking a position that tanks their real estate positions?

They are reading the script. It is an narrative.

Mostly it is very hard politics.

Forcing tech people to live in zone X will increase voters and tax revenues to political party Z.

there is whole system to "milk" the middle class.

Rents, taxes, products, private schools, medical centers, etc.

Now with remote working suddenly some rents are getting lower in high rent places.

People are now really choosing where they want to be and whom they will socialize.

Imagine the audacity of serfs having freedom..

I assume most of this is simple survivorship bias. The kind of people who become executive leaders are the those who thrive in that specific office environment, so naturally they will want to preserve it.

It's like asking polar bears what temperature to set the thermostat. They're going to want it like the arctic because that's their home.

Well, as part of my MBA classes I read a metric ton of WFH articles and some interviews with CEOs. And all of them get the same advice from their HR, finance and compliance and likely get very similar responses from their respective heads. Since that is the case, it is less of a surprise that the decisions they optimize for is so prevalent.

As an anecdote, as part my class last semester I did an interview with 2nd in command at our company. It was exactly this. Covid is a temporary distortion of the market.

edit: removed between the lines part; its my interpretation so it might be an unfair read

I don't know why these companies with massive in-person offices don't just convert them into mini data centers. Maybe have 1 or 2 top level floors reserved for in-person meetings or executives but the rest of the building can be used for housing data centers.

Most businesses wouldn't even need to an entire floor.

I don't think offices make great datacenters without a lot of investment in HVAC at least, beyond the handful of racks they might already have in a few rooms. Plus most businesses don't own their offices, they lease them from a property owner that would probably prefer to keep it as office space should the business fail.

So why don't they just not renew the lease on 50-80% of that expensive office space? It's not like a majority of tech businesses own the buildings their office is in. Or if they do, rent the excess out to others. (Sure, right now if everyone does either, the office-space rental market will pretty much crash... But a lot more tech corps would profit from that than would suffer from not getting good profits from renting out their property.)

I think that part of the resistance is that if you have people who work remote, the bonds you build with the company and your coworkers can potentially be less strong than if you were there in person. This may make it easier for employees to job hop.

Another reason could be real estate related. If you signed a long term commercial lease right before covid hit, you want to make sure that you're getting your moneys worth.

Yes, as a hiring manager I have seen this. There is certainly less friction to moving jobs when all you do is show up on a different video call the next monday. However, I would argue that there is certainly something lost in the personal interaction. While we've been individually productive during the pandemic, more complicated design/brainstorming has been slower.

Also, part of the human experience is that bond. fellowship with your team if you will.

> more complicated design/brainstorming has been slower

Could you say a little more about why you feel this to be the case? I haven't noticed much slowdown at all.

They may be measuring productivity wrong. People may be working. But are they working on the right things and solving the problems correctly? For example, is creativity and genuine cross-team collaboration suffering? Those are much harder to measure, and at certain companies like startups that have ill-defined processes, these may be breaking down. Again, I’m not saying this with certainty. But perhaps this could be one view from the C-suite.

Curious, what makes you think productivity has increased at your job? Like how are you measuring that?

I've worked at two fairly large companies during the pandemic, and both have publicly stated that their productivity has increased as a result of WFH. I've heard a variety of measures being mentioned such as profitability, hours worked per week, and responsiveness of employees when they are needed outside of normal working hours for production issues - they found people to be much easier to reach when their home office is their office.

It is clear, however that this data was gathered and released by a different part of the company than the ones that make the call on whether or not people will be required to come back in. Ultimately it's as we would expect: executive leadership deciding to pull people back in has little to do with data and more to do with feelings. Despite publishing that data and overwhelming support for full-time WFH, both have begun the process of pulling people back in.

I've seen a lot of data that shows hours per week have gone up, but hours isn't necessarily productivity.

"Ultimately it's as we would expect: executive leadership deciding to pull people back in has little to do with data and more to do with feelings."

One of the few things the far left has been right about all along: it is not a meritocracy, it is all about perception and feelings.

From what I see and hear the work-in-the-office rule is, for the most part, cause I (mgt) say so

>such as profitability, hours worked per week, and responsiveness of employees when they are needed outside of normal working hours for production issues

I'm sorry none of those are direct indication of productivity per se, even profitability, which is a long lagging indicator of productivity.

It's not an exact science, but based on our team's velocity which is tracked in Jira, we appear to complete more units of work while remote...but of course there are likely numerous factors to consider.

Anecdotally, we've seen more velocity in Jira from the same engineers - about 20% more. However, I've also noticed people are working more hours, which is more challenging to quantify. Hour-by-hour productivity may be a wash. Regardless, more stuff is getting done, and employee sentiment seems to remain the same as pre/post pandemic.

> I'm not quite sure where all the resistance to remote work is coming from.

You are assuming that the people who make decisions are somehow more rational than anyone else.

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